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A Good Day to Die/Chapter FourB
When Lottie felt the arms wrap around her, she was ready to be dragged away and kidnapped. She was ready to be stabbed, or shot, or thrown to the floor and raped. The one thing she wasn't expecting was what she got: a hug. "Fuckin' 'ell I thought I'd lost ya" Yaz said as she pulled Lottie closer. "What the hell were you thinking kid?" "I was scared and you two were arguing and that man...oh god that man...what did Desmond do to him?"" "Listen kiddo" Yaz said, holding Lottie's face with both hands and looking her in the eyes. "That's all done now, it's gone, it's out of the way. What matters now is us; the two of us, surviving, no matter the cost. If you need to cry, let it all out now. I'm here for you, and you should know that, but there isn't any room for tears where we're going. Understand?" Lottie simply nodded and buried her face into Yaz's shoulder. The redhead pulled her closer, trying to muffle her new friend's whimpers as she scanned the area for any danger. Threats in this world, human or otherwise, didn't wait for you to finish a sentimental moment. ----- The man stared back at Meadowbrook Castle with a look of misery, one he usually saved for weddings and funerals, which were in his opinion the most tragic events in a person's life. Down below him, he could see the village burning; people being herded around by militia members, and any resistance being met with a bloody cocktail of rape and execution. He twisted the lid from his hip flask and took a drink of whiskey, his poison of choice. He needed the numbing sensation it would provide. Everything he had built, destroyed. Everyone he had loved, either dead or detained. His life's work was destroyed, and all because of one man. One petty, self-serving, arrogant, sadistic man. He took a deep breath, this anger wouldn't get him anywhere. But alas, it was all he had as he looked down upon the charred corpse of his community. A single tear ran down his cheek as he said: "Someday, Danny-boy, you'll live to regret this. Someday, when you're asleep in your bed and the world is at your feet, you'll see an old man with dark eyes watching you. And that old man will wrap his hands around your throat and take great pleasure in squeezing out whatever remaining humanity you have left in your shell of a soul." With a sigh, the man rose to his feet. He pulled his kit bag over his shoulder, and gave his people one last pitiful glance. As he left his life's work behind him, he tipped his hip flask upside down and drained the contents onto the woodland floor. This was a time for action, not alcohol. ----- Yaz wasn't going to give in. She wasn't going to give into Lottie's complaints of tiredness, nor the aching in her legs, nor the fact that she might've just lost one of her closest friends forever. "Are you sure you don't want to rest for a second?" Lottie asked from behind her. "No" Yaz replied, spitting the word from her mouth as if it were an overly-sour sweet. The truth was, she really wanted to rest. She wanted to sit down and have a smoke and wait for Desmond to come find them; but that wasn't possible. She had to carry on walking. "Yaz...you need to stop..." Lottie urged her, placing a firm yet comforting hand on her shoulder. "Bollocks do I, I'm fine." "What part of acting like some sort of human machine is fine?" "I'm not acting like anything, I'm just doing what needs to be done. What I need to do, what we need to do, is keep walking." "That's the thing...you're not walking Yaz..,you're running..." "Running? I don't know what this looks like to you, but we'd be moving much faster if we were running chick." Yaz knew that stating the obvious would only delay the inevitable truth by a few seconds, but to her, another second of blissful ignorance was worth it. "You're running like that, you're running away." Lottie told her; unaware that, deep down, Yaz had known that all along. "You're not even running from those men, you're running away from it all. From that girl in the bedroom, from Desmond, from all those dead people." Lottie stopped, and just as Yaz opened her mouth to speak, she continued. "Jesus...you're running away from me..." That hit home like nothing else could. Yaz had known she was running away since the moment she'd found Lottie in that grove, but she'd assumed that her new friend was running with her, the two of them hiding from a cruel world. It hadn't even occurred to her that she might've left behind the one person she still had. "Fuckin' 'ell, I'm sorry chick" Yaz said as she turned and wrapped an unsuspecting Lottie in a tight hug, closing her eyes to stop herself from crying. "We're a team, you and me, yeah?" "Yeah" Lottie replied, returning the hug. Sadly, as the two friends held eachother, united against the world; neither of them thought to keep their eyes open. ----- "Tracks..." the man muttered to himself as he knelt to the ground. In front of him were two pairs of footprints, both leading into the woods. The first set he recognised as belonging to a pair of the hiking boots, with similar treads to those he would give to his scouting groups "Probably Brooke...but it could be Yaz...or maybe even Maria, if she went out with them..." The second pair were alien to him, but still recognisable. They were from commercial trainers, that was easy to tell, but the footprints were too light to be from either a man or anyone carrying a significant amount of equipment. That only left him one option: Brooke or Yaz or Maria, whoever it was, had left with a new recruit, who was almost certainly female. With a short grunt, he rose to his feet. Those girls would be in trouble if he didn't reach them before Hinton's men, and he didn't like trouble. ----- "Don't move a fucking muscle girlie" Lottie heard the man rasp as he breathed down her neck. She could feel Yaz shivering with fear against her as the foul creature's hand crawled across her body, while his other hand was busy digging the muzzle of a pistol into her back. "What've we got here then? Two little lovers lezzin' it up? Darren likes himself a bit of that, oh yes he does. Why don't you give Darren a nice little show, eh?" "And I take it you're Darren?" Yaz said with a hint of snark. "At your service" he grinned. "Now do me a favour and lose the shirts, ladies." Lottie took a deep breath as he backed away from them. She turned slowly, as did Yaz, to face Darren, and that was when they realised the true futility of their situation. He had a gun pointed at each of them, and there was no way that they could get a jump on him. "So tell me Darren..." Yaz said jovially, much to Lottie's surprise. "What made Mr Hinton decide to make you the poster boy paedophile? Was it the neckbeard or the fact that you look like the son of John Lennon and Rose West?" The significance only hit Lottie when she followed Yaz's stare past Darren. Crouching just a few metres away was a man, who looked to be in his mid-sixties, and was dressed in more khaki than she had thought humanly possible. Yaz is making a distraction, she realised. "W-what the fuck are you talking about, g- g-get that fucking top off you slut...now!" Darren bellowed, waving his guns as if he were a child with a pair of flags. "You know..." Yaz continued, ignoring his warnings, "I really have to hand it to Hinton. It's not every day that you see a perfect splice of Robin Gibb and Jimmy Sav-" "Th-th-that's enough, whore!" Darren shouted, cutting Yaz off mid-sentence. "Either you take your fucking tops off and start lezzin' it up, or I'll send you back to Captain Hinton, and he can do the punishing." "Speaking of punishments" Yaz smirked. "Look behind you Darren..." Darren turned, but was met mid-pivot by the old man, who pinned him to the floor at an almost unnatural speed. Lottie looked to Yaz, who simply grinned at her, before pointing out that the man had kicked away Darren's guns almost effortlessly. Unlike Lottie, she wasn't at all in awe. "Do you know who I am, scumbag?" the man asked Darren, one foot planted firmly on his chest. "Dead meat, when Captain Hinton finds you..." "I'm afraid you're wrong there matey, seeing as it's taken Hinton the better part of two years to grow balls big enough to even challenge me..." The man pulled a large serrated knife from his belt and hovered it over Darren's neck with an almost comical smirk. "Are you going to say it, or does Sally here have to make you?" "Oh no...fuck no...not you..." "Yes me, but for the sake of this lass here.." he pointed at Lottie and flashed her a friendly smile, before returning to Darren, "...would you please say it aloud." "Y-you're...you're..." "Oh come on lad, it's hardly University Challenge" "You're the fucking Colonel..." Darren panted. "Ten points to Cambridge" the Colonel chuckled, before slitting Darren's throat from ear to ear.